Comix Influx Blog: Peur(s) Du Noir

I went to see “Fear(s) of the Dark” (“Peur(s) du Noir”) at the ICA on Monday night – a one-off event in Paul Gravett’s ComICA Festival. Echoing Mikke’s sentiments on the mailing list, one of our party described the film as a “mixed bag”, which I think is fair. But the highlights are so great that it would be churlish to dwell too much on the low points.

The film is split into several short stories, joined by shorter interludes. The stories were by Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Lorenzo Mattotti and Richard Maguire. The Burns piece was good – very reminiscent of Black Hole. It generated a good atmosphere of adolescent lust and simmering menace. The art was typical Burns, but laid onto 3d CGI animation – it worked pretty well.

In contrast, the piece by Marie Caillou didn’t work so well for me – the art was very attractive, a simple Manga style (the story was set in Japan) with clean, flat panels of colour, kinda like the effect you can get with paper collage. There were some really good creepy moments in there – particularly featuring the bullying children obsessed by a dead samurai. But despite those moments the story was just a little too confused to really work.

Mattotti’s work was astounding. He worked in soft pencil, using lots of busy shading (similar to his work in Stigmata) . His depictions of rain, mist and clouds, of the people, the countryside – all were really effective. It was astonishingly beautiful. The story hung together nicely too.

The last piece was by Richard Maguire – this was my favourite. The animation was incredibly smooth – like the Burns piece, it must have used some 3d rendering software. It gave it a very clean, smooth feel (not unexpected from McGuire). The story, though slight, was wonderfully creepy, helped by lots of nice visual touches. The most successful piece for me.

There were two sets of linking pieces, one by Blutch and the other by Pierre di Sciullo. Blutch’s looked beautiful, employing a similar pencilled style to that in his last book La Volupté. The story, though, – involving an old aristocrat type gleefully loosing a terrifying bunch of ferocious dogs on various townsfolk – was just a bit too gratuitously nasty (although I did think the ending just about worked). This felt a bit of a missed opportunity. The work by Sciullo consisted of a woman talking about her, largely abstract, fears, over shifting geometric patterns. It didn’t really add much.

Interestingly, Dupuy-Berberian were supposed to be involved in the project, but apparently pulled out due to pressure of work. Hopefully, whatever they did produce will get released somewhere.

Overall, the film is great – the best pieces will stay with me for a long time. Afterwards, a bunch of us hung out in the ICA bar, talking comics, design, and train-travel.

All images courtesy of the official website.